A network is an interconnected group of computers and resources that allows communication between the resources connected to the network. Networks may be comprised of only a few network resources or up to thousands of resources all communicating over the same network. Further, communication over the network may take place even though the resources connected to the network may be located around in the world. A network may further be divided into interconnected sub-networks, with some resources having a network presence on multiple sub-networks.
Networks are generally managed and monitored by an administrator or group of administrators that structure the network and network resources to facilitate the sharing of information. To manage the network, the administrators may access and configure the various resources connected to the network. A variety of access methods exist that allow network administrators access to the different resources of the network. Some common access methods include simple network management protocol (SNMP), telnet, secure shell (SSH), intelligent platform management interface (IPMI) and command line interfaces (CLI).
Each network resource may be accessed through one, a few, or many access methods and through one or through multiple sub-networks. For example, an administrator may access a router using the SNMP management access point from any of the sub-networks to which the router is connected. The administrator may also access the same router using an SSH management access point from any of these sub-networks. Further, each management access point may provide a different set of management options for configuring the resource depending on the management access point chosen. For example, accessing the router using SNMP may provide a read-only view of the router's configuration, and provide the ability to raise asynchronous notifications when there are error conditions. However, to perform administrative changes to the router, such as powering it off, it may be necessary to use the SSH management access point of that same router. This SSH access point may provide the ability to power-down and reconfigure the router, but may not have the ability to send asynchronous notifications to the administrator about error conditions. Thus, each management access point to each resource connected to the network may provide the administrator with a different set of management options.
Each management access point to a resource may be referred to a partial view of the resource. Thus, multiple partial views of each resource connected to the network may be provided to an adminstrator or group of administrators. Each resource may be accessed through multiple management access points, thereby provided many partial views of the resource. Hence, an administrator desiring to access a resource to manage the network may be faced with multiple partial views of the resource. In addition, since each management access point may be exposed through multiple sub-networks, the number of access points to the resource are increased. Traditionally, it has been assumed that the administrator knows which view of the resource is needed to perform the desired maintenance on the network resource. For example, the administrator must know that to power down the router, he must manually log into the router rather than access the router using IPMI. In addition, traditionally, the administrator is expected to know that different views across multiple sub-networks of the same resource actually refer to the same underlying resource.